10 Best Anti-Valentine's Day Movies

For a great many years, Hollywood has been selling teenagers the dream of the perfect Prom Night, another supposed rite of passage for teenagers which has become so prominent in the popular consciousness that even schools in countries that never used to do it (including the UK) have adopted the custom.

Of course, Hollywood has also shown us how the prom night dream can rapidly turn sour, most famously in Carrie. However, 2009 Australian horror The Loved Ones gives us perhaps our most unsettling and eerily plausible vision of the lengths one unhinged girl and her doting father will go to for her dream of being Queen of the high school dance.

Robin McLeavy is Lola, a social outcast who longs for romance and popularity, but when this is not forthcoming, she takes a somewhat unorthodox approach to fulfil her desires; abducting her dream boy Brent (Xavier Samuel) for the purposes of a 'dance' in her own home, with hideous torture ensuing if things don't go the way she wants them to.

The feature debut of writer-director Sean Byrne, The Loved Ones very much fits in with the 'torture porn' horror wave of the 2000s, but with just enough satirical jet-black humour to set it apart.